Mad Moon of Dreams

by Brian Lumley

  The ship had turned gray as the wizards’ beams, leprous as the ephemeral smoke-cloud, leaden as thunderheads in a winter sky—and heavy as the rock from which she now seemed carved!

  “Stone!” Eldin’s voice was hoarse with horror. “She falls out of the sky like a stone!”

  And it was true. The leaden sails of Nimbus no longer billowed but stood stiff as if starched; her stony hull and decks showed all of a ship’s detail without its life and movement and texture; the gray ropes of her rigging were rigid as stalactites, and the crew that lurched from her decks into space looked lifeless as lead soldiers. Nimbus was a ship of the clouds no longer but a hurled stone plummeting to earth! And she struck like a stone, shattering into a thousand pieces …

  Almost before the four witnesses of this monstrous magic could catch their breath, Mnomquah’s wizards raised their wands a second time. But before they could thrust them snakelike at the sky—

  “No more of that!” cried Hero aloud, springing from the crater and rushing in to engage the wizards at close quarters. “No more wand-play, monsters. Let’s see how your spells face up to cold steel!”

  Nor was Hero alone in his headlong attack, for hot on his heels came a roaring Eldin and a pair of lithe vixens with eyes full of hell’s own fire and fury. And as the blind moonbeasts turned to face this new threat, so they found themselves confronted with four bright and dazzling scythes of death that gave them no time at all to work fresh wonders.

  “This for Nimbus!” cried Hero, driving curved Kledan steel through pschent, writhing pink face-tentacles and pulpy head alike.

  “And this for Skipcloud!” roared Eldin, severing the wand-arm of his prey and gutting him with the next quicksilver stroke.

  “Let’s not forget Cumulus!” trilled Ula, her rapier ripping the throat of a third wizard.

  “Even Shantak deserves her share of vengeance!” sang Una, decapitating a fourth, “—though her memory shan’t find me shedding a great many tears.”

  By now the two remaining monsters were shambling back toward the great door in the hillside, their magic forgotten in the face of quester fury—but Hero was not willing to let them escape so lightly. “After them,” he growled. “Don’t let them get away. Who knows how many more of these priest-wizards there are in the hill, or what they’ll be up to next? We’ve more than ourselves to think of now.”

  Close behind the moonbeasts, he paused for a moment at the great pivoting slab which was the door to the temple. Then he beckoned the others on and crossed the threshold. Eldin and the girls hurried after him, into the blue-litten dimness of an extensive cavern system which reached back like some unholy warren of evil into the heart of the hill. And indeed at this point they might just have turned back—but with a sigh and a rumble the mighty door pivoted shut behind them, bringing down dust from an unseen, centuried ceiling.

  “Well, that’s that,” whispered the Wanderer in a tone of disgusted finality. He spat into corpse-fire gloom. “We can’t go back, so we have to go on.”

  “Stay close behind me,” said Hero with an economy of words. “We’re not finished yet. We’ve done our bit—but perhaps we can still do a bit more.”

  “Right!” Ula quietly but emphatically agreed. “In the very guts of Mnomquah’s temple, surely we can make a nuisance of ourselves before we’re done?”

  “We can at least try,” whispered Una with equal fervor. “And if these are his guts, what say we give him a pain in ’em? … Which way did the moonbeasts go?”

  “Down there, I think,” answered Hero, pointing into gloom. “Come on, let’s go. But carefully …”

  Left on his own for a moment, Eldin gave himself a little shake, as if to make sure he was awake. “Damn me,” he muttered then. “As if Hero weren’t bad enough on his own, it seems I’ve now got three of ’em to worry about!” But as the shadows began to close in on him, he hastened in pursuit …

  CHAPTER V

  Moonmoth

  As the four moved forward through the temple’s labyrinth, their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. Getting used to the utter silence, however, was a far more difficult thing. After the boom of cannons, the splintering of timbers and the shrieks of doomed men and monsters, the unbelievable quiet of this subterranean maze was almost deafening in its intensity. It was a silence such as might live in the tombs at the end of time.

  “Have no fear, girls,” Eldin whispered, his very whisper echoing in the hollow stillness. “We’ve been down to the pits of the underworld, Hero and I—to the Vale of Pnoth itself—and came back alive and sane. Well, alive anyway …”

  “Shh!” Hero hissed. “Quiet, man! In this place a whisper has the volume of a warcry.” He lowered his own voice to a mere breath. “If you must talk at all, then do it like this. Merely breathe the words. All right?”

  Eldin tried it and found that it worked. “You know,” he breathed, “I’m not blaming you, lad, but I think we erred coming in here. I mean, we don’t seem to be serving a great deal of purpose here, if you see what I’m getting at.”

  “Oh, but we are!” Ula protested, her voice the smallest shiver in the pale blue light. “For one thing, we’ve distracted the attention of the moonbeast wizards away from the flotilla.”

  “That’s right,” put in Una. “Trapped in here, they can’t use their magic on Limnar’s ships.”

  “Oh, we have them trapped, do we?” said Eldin, at the same time avoiding the luminous glow of a great stalactite where it hung from the dim and uneven ceiling. “See, to my mind it’s more a case of—”

  “Shh!” Hero hissed again. “I’m sure I sense some movement then. Also, I believe I heard something.”

  They had reached a great junction of burrows, emerging into a large, low-ceilinged cave whose walls were literally honeycombed with tunnels which led off to unknown destinations. The floor was very slippery here, worn smooth by the feet of Mnomquah’s priests and wizards and worshippers since an age when the moon was in its infancy. Most of the tunnels were artificial, but there were natural fissures, too, and the low ceiling was split right across in a deep, dark gash.

  “There!” said Hero as they paused. “Did you hear it that time?”

  “Aye,” breathed Eldin after a moment’s rapt attention. “The moonbeasts at their adoration. Demon flutes massed in low key, like a distant booming of crazed frogs.”

  Hero shook his head. “No, there’s more to it than simple worship,” he said.

  “A sort of urgency,” added Ula.

  “An urging,” Una corrected her.

  “A calling!” Hero named it. “They’re calling Mnomquah up from hell, calling him out of his pit!”

  “And that’s not all,” said Eldin, “for now I hear something else.”

  “A hissing, perhaps?” Hero inquired.

  The Wanderer nodded his great head. “Aye, like flotation essence venting from a ruptured bag.”

  “And growing louder,” Una confirmed, dread of the unknown trembling in her voice.

  “Coming this way!” gasped Ula.

  “Quickly,” Hero hissed. “Follow me.” He crouched down, sprang aloft and hauled himself up into the great crack in the ceiling. The fault was more horizontal than vertical, sloping away from the junction of tunnels at a shallow angle. Hero lay down and reached out his arm to help the others climb, and in a little while they lay close together and peered breathlessly down at the area just vacated.

  Nor had they been any too quick off the mark, for scant seconds later the hissing suddenly increased threefold and the darkness in the cave visibly lessened. The questers and their women drew back into shadows then as a strange dim glow entered the cave, a shaft of gray half-light liberally sprinkled with golden motes. Writhing and twisting, that awful beam—like smoke braided into a plait—paused in the space beneath; and indeed the four knew that this was none other than a shaft of monstrous magic, sent from the tips of moonbeast wands to seek them out!

  For a moment or two the head of the snakelike be
am, a foot thick and flattened like the head of a cobra, swayed and hovered in the center of the cave before sinking down to floor level, almost as if to sniff in the manner of some hideous hound. Then it lifted and recommenced its swaying motion, and finally it wove away down that tunnel by which the four had entered. Unbroken, the swirling, gaseous body of the beam followed its head, interminably writhing through the junction chamber.

  Not one of the four made the slightest sound, nor even breathed aloud—for all had seen what the gray beam did to Nimbus, and to her crew.

  Then, tugging at the sleeves of his friends, Hero crept backwards away from the mouth of the crevice, turned on all fours and began to feel his way into the near-darkness of the unknown fissure. Soundlessly the others followed, eager to put distance between themselves and the sentient-seeming beam of gray light. Once more their eyes were required to grow accustomed to the gloom—a deeper gloom here, where there was an absence of all but a trace of the blue luminosity—and as they went so the fault expanded until they were able to stand erect. After that they made good speed until the crevice turned abruptly upward to become a tight and stygian flue or chimney.

  “Now we climb,” Hero brushed the silence with a breath of speech. “We questers are used to this—you might even say we’re experts—but what about you girls?”

  Dark heads gave shining, negative shakes and green eyes widened in elfin faces. “Sword play, yes—” said Ula.

  “Fool’s play, no!” Una finished it. “Ham Gidduf used to say our legs were far too pretty to break taking tumbles.”

  “The silly old short-sighted sod was probably right,” commented Eldin without malice. “Ah, well—we’ll just have to teach you.”

  “Aye,” Hero grimly agreed, “but we could have asked for better conditions.”

  The questers climbed into the volcanic rock chimney, finding it easy going and passing the girls between them from stretch to stretch. By this time full twenty minutes had ticked away since they entered the door in the hillside, and they could not help but wonder how Limnar’s tiny fleet was doing now. They wondered, too, about the very faintest of tremors which were beginning to make themselves felt in the rock all around them—as if a giant stirred in the depths below—and they shuddered as they remembered the cryptic bass pipings of Mnomquah’s moonbeast priests. Then, to speed them on their way, there came again that hissing of escaping gas, and they knew that the gray beam was hot on their trail once more.

  As that fearful sound grew louder below and behind them, suddenly the chimney became a blow-hole that opened abruptly into a huge but patently unfrequented cave. Here the blue light was stronger, where great stalactites festooned the ceiling and pumice dust lay in a thick carpet all around. It was a natural cave and must be totally unknown to the moonbeasts.

  Eldin was first to emerge and he quickly hauled the others up to stand beside him, ankle-deep in the drifted dust of ages. “Where now?” he queried Hero in a breathless whisper.

  The other shrugged helplessly, staring this way and that. “Damned if I know—but we have to make up our minds quickly, before—”

  “Who comes?” a crystal voice full of fear sang out in their minds, causing all four to start violently and hug each other tightly at the shock of the thing. “Who disturbs me in the Sleep of the Change? Is it moonbeasts, come to cut out my great heart while I helplessly hang here? Oh, who shall protest my unhatched sisters now?” And as they gradually relaxed, the tinkling telepathic voice filled the four with its fear and sadness.

  Meanwhile, the loathsome, near-distant hissing sound had subsided a little, telling them that the gray beam had picked up a false trail; but the tremors in the earth were grown much stronger, more frequent and threatening; and all taken into account, it seemed to the questers and their women that they were being driven toward some unknown precipice from which there would be no escape. This new thing—this telepathic voice in their heads—was just something else to set nerves a-jangle, to increase the hysteria building inside them.

  “Who?—what?—dammit!—where are you?” Hero asked at last, barely remembering to keep his own voice to the merest whisper. “And listen, whoever you are: if the moonbeasts are your enemies, then you have nothing to fear from us.”

  For an answer he felt a crystal tinkling in his mind—a searching, a seeking-out of truth—and knew that his three friends were similarly affected. Whatever the presence was which dwelled in this cave, it quickly satisfied itself that there was nothing of harm in the questers … certainly none directed toward its at present unknown self. And again it spoke to them:

  “I am Eeth, a moonmoth maiden—or I will be when my metamorphosis is complete.”

  “Hero!” Eldin hoarsely whispered and clutched the other’s elbow. “One of these stalactites is alive!” He pointed a shaking finger at a stony, stubby column of rock where it depended from the ceiling. “The thing’s moving,” declared the Wanderer. “Will you look!”

  Hero looked, the girls too, and they all commenced to back away as the great stalactite’s surface pulsed … and rested … pulsed … and rested … pulsed, and—

  “Like a heart!” Hero whispered.

  “Oh, yes, it is my heart you see beating,” the crystal voice told them. “The casing is not a stalactite, however, but a cocoon. Nature has designed it this way to deceive the moonbeasts, who find moonmoth flesh irresistible.”

  Still backing away, Ula gave a little cry as the backs of her legs struck something and she tripped and sat. When the dust settled she got to her feet in a circle of five great white ovals, each one large as a decent-sized boulder. The things looked for all the world like huge—

  “My sisters!” cried the telepathic voice. “Oh, be careful! They are not yet hatched—and there are so very few of us!”

  Hero helped Ula step out from the circle of great eggs and turned back to the living stalactite. “You mean you’re a chrysalis?” he said, astonishment coloring every whispered word.

  “That is correct,” answered the voice, “but in a little while I shall be Eeth, a moonmoth maid—if the moonbeasts don’t find me first!”

  “Eeth,” Eldin now stepped boldly forward, a hopeful rumble in his echoing voice. “If you got in here there must be a way out. Now do be a good chrysalis and—”

  “Shh!” Hero fairly danced in his torment, leaping on Eldin and clamping a hand over his mouth. “Great oaf! Be qui—”

  But too late …

  From somewhere deep in the heart of the hill a droning of triumphant flutes reached out to them, and at the same time the moonrock beneath their feet gave a sharp and very distinct lurch. Important and ominous as these signs were, Eldin’s ill-timed outburst had not been responsible for them. It was, however, responsible for the other thing:

  Namely, a more deliberate and knowing renewal of the horrid hissing! For even as the ground bucked again and dust shivered from above, so a grim gray light gleamed from below; and up from the hole in the cave’s floor rose a vast nodding head of writhing, gold-speckled smoke.

  “The magic of the moonbeasts!” cried the crystal voice in the minds of the questers. “Farewell, my new-found friends—for we are all doomed now!”

  CHAPTER VI

  Mnomquah!

  At that precise moment when the smoke-formed wandsnake of the moonbeast sorcerers thrust its hissing head up through the chimney and into the moonmoth’s cavern, an equally terrifying emergence was taking place on the lunar surface. Namely, that of Mnomquah’s head from the mouth of his vast burrow. More of that in a moment …

  In the meantime, all had not gone well for Limnar Dass and his now greatly reduced flotilla. He had recently lost another ship; powder was so low as to be almost exhausted aboard his remaining vessels; and Gnorri II herself, having suffered structural damage in the collision with the Leng ship and her subsequent plunge to moon’s surface, was not answering the helm with half her usual willingness. The enemy fleet, on the other hand, had rallied from its initial pounding and was n
ow well deployed to apply maximum firepower in the task of reducing the flotilla to aerial rubble.

  This, despite the continuing loss of their own vessels to the flotilla’s superior gunnery, was exactly what the Lengites were doing; even now an enemy cannonade removed the bridge from one of Limnar’s surviving nucleus of ships. And still the flotilla fought back, though for a certainty the end was nigh.

  Zura’s Shroud continued to do remarkably well—so well indeed that Limnar was given to wonder how the zombie gunners fared in the massive recoil of their cannons. The living dead, by their very nature, are highly vulnerable to hard knocks and shakes; so that by now Shroud’s deck must be a veritable nightmare of detached, kicking limbs and various other more or less mobile bits and pieces.

  As for Lathi’s Chrysalis: just how that paper ship held together at all was a mystery Limnar Dass would never fathom. She was a very light vessel, of course, and perhaps that had much to do with it; but long after better ships had plunged to their doom, Chrysalis continued to give back blow for blow, even though she was little more than a torn rag in the sky. Yes, and if Hero and Eldin were here now, Limnar was sure that they would applaud the tenacity of these inhuman once-enemies no less than he himself.

  Hero and Eldin … Their loss over all else was the one blow which had troubled the sky-Captain beyond endurance. For he felt certain that they had gone down into the throat of the moon-pit along with the Leng ship. The questers and their brave ladies, fighting to the last, gone down to the bowels of the moon to spit in Mnomquah’s blind eyes.

  Well, they had left a rare legacy behind them; for it was as if something of the questers had found its way into the hearts of each and every surviving human, as if they fought even now right alongside their old enemies, Zura and Lathi, urging them to greater excesses of effort. And right there and then in the midst of the battle, even as the sky-Captain was given momentarily to admire the grit—the sheer fighting spirit—of dreamland’s handful of battered ships, so there came that one cry he had most dreaded to hear: the despairing voices of his gunners, reporting that the powder was finished, that Gnorri II had fired her last shot.